The bulk of the pilot work done in Q3 was in three categories:

On-board Unit Testing, Assembly and Installation

The OBU unit performs a number of functions essential to the success of the pilot including:

captures data from the vehicle

sends data across the mobile network to city-hosted server

receives data back from the city-hosted servers

displays actionable messages to the driver in the vehicle.

Several firmware updates were applied to the V2X board and to the Raspberry Pi board to fix communication bugs found during testing. An additional update was required to perform power management of the OBU so that it would turn on/off when the vehicle was started/shut off.

The OBU also was found to be sensitive to the heat in Las Vegas causing inconsistent behaviors. As a fix, the team installed “heat sinks” on the V2X board which seemed to alleviate the problem. At the end of September, the OBU was still not performing consistently thus, the project was delayed to debug these problems. It was determined to not install additional OBUs until they could be proven to perform consistently.

Data Analytics Tooling Installed and Tested

Even with inconsistent data flow from the OBUs, some data reached the server and could be analyzed and reported. Hortonworks installed and configured the Zeppelin tool for performing analytics reporting. The project is now poised to perform additional analytics once the data flow from the OBU stabilizes.

Definition and Validation of Problem Statements 2 and 3

The project was able to perform some tests of problem statement 2 (approaching a crosswalk) and found that alerts were received after the crosswalk was reached. The distance variable was tweaked resulting in better results. Initial discussions were held about problem statement 3 (active bus stop) focused first on the sources of static (bus stop location) and dynamic (bus location) data. Necessary scripting on the Hortonworks platform will be performed in Q4.

End of Quarter Status:

Hardware/On-board Unit: The OBUs still have some bugs to work out. Additional firmware builds will be a priority in Q4 with hopes of resolving the issues by end of October. The heat issue also will need to be rectified in future vehicles through the installation of heat sinks on the V2X board.

Servers/Data: The servers seem to be stable and the GENIVI RVI and Hortonworks software running as expected. The addition of Zeppelin gives the project data analytics and reporting capabilities for when the data flow becomes more reliable. The data sources required for problem statement 3 have been identified.

Communications: The project received additional local press mentions and updates were presented in multiple event contexts. Plans are underway for a project read-out during CES 2018.

Executive: The Executive Subcommittee decided to delay further vehicle installations until the OBU performance stabilized. It also decided to hold off on deploying three additional technologies in the context of the pilot until the core problem statements could be deployed.